Lode Runner, a game many of us logged hundreds of hours upon. Lode Runner has a great deal of replay value thanks to its great map editor. The game was first published by Broderbund in 1983, but was first prototyped by Douglas Smith, an architecture student at the University of Washington.
The Lode Runner prototype was called Kong and was originally written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer on campus, but shortly after it was ported to the VAX minicomputer. Originally programmed in FORTRAN and utilized only ASCII character graphics (the most basic of characters).
In September of 1982 Smith was able to port it to the Apple II+ (in assembly language) and renamed it to Miner. In October of that same year he submitted a rough copy to Broderbund and he’s said to have received a one-line rejection letter, “Sorry, your game doesn’t fit into our product line; please feel free to submit future products.”
The original title had no joystick support and was developed in full black and white…not exactly exciting. So, Smith then borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and quickly received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Brøderbund.
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Red Dead Redemption 2, baby. Can’t wait for it!
Hi guys.
Thanks for this big long episode. I really enjoyed it, i like long ones …. you get more from the same source 🙂
I hope all of you had a nice Christmas and a good start in the new year.
The games i am waiting for in 2018 are:
Last of us 2
Bloodstained
Magic The Gathering – Arena
Nu no kuni 2
Dead stranding (or maybe 2019?)
Seasons of heaven
Mega man 11
Soul Calibur 6
Magic the Gathering Arena is “only” a card game, and is nearly the same game as already available as MTGO, but it has a different look, more like Hearthstone and i am totally in to card games 🙂
Most of the titles are also not “new” but i really hope that these new parts of the series (can i call it that way, even if its only the second title?) are as good, as the ones before.
I really like your podcast and hope you will do this for a long time in the future 🙂
Greetings from Germany.
Ralf